For how long must the BBC ride in the two horse race?
Catering for those who get their media via the internet and those who watch and listen to traditional channels could last a generation, warns Raymond Snoddy.
The announcement by BBC director-general Lord Tony Hall that the Corporation plans to launch a new online television channel for Scotland is revealing for a number of reasons.
A new channel for Scotland is a sign that in the post referendum world, and in a nation dominated domestically by the SNP, something has got to be done by the London-controlled BBC.
The Scots Nats have unsurprisingly been wailing that more of the £323 million raised by Scottish licence payers should be spent in Scotland, preferably all of it.
The offer of an online television channel – if channel is the right term for it – is unlikely to please anybody, though Hall is also talking about more BBC programmes made in Scotland and in news appears willing to disinter the old idea of the “Scottish Six.”
But Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, wants a proper grown up terrestrial broadcast channel like other people have, and not the online sop of a ragbag of programmes deposited on the internet.
At least the BBC director-general was honest. Plans drawn up for a Scottish terrestrial channel have had to be shelved following last year’s licence fee settlement when the BBC was forced to fund free licence fees for the over 75s.
The money simply isn’t there. It was made clear to the Scottish Parliament’s education and culture committee that this was a budget issue. By implication there was the tacit acceptance that an online channel was therefore an unfortunate necessity, somewhat inferior to the real thing.
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Similar underlying causes lie behind the impending closure on 16 February of BBC Three, or BBCII! as we perhaps should now know it.
At least the arrival of the BBC II! logo has helped to lift the gloom of the post-Christmas blues, with an especially piquant performance coming from BBC ThreeThree’s head of marketing Nikki Carr.
Naturally the new logo was designed to fit the digital world rather than being something shoe-horned in from the analogue world.
It was particularly striking, she argued, that the logo “didn’t actually say three.” Striking indeed.
“We wanted to be bold and create something that will be around for years to come,” Carr explained.
It will be lucky to see out the end of February.
Unlike the non-appearance of a Scottish terrestrial channel, in the case of the disappearance of BBC II! online, the BBC tried to wrap up economic necessity in a strategic overcoat.
Is that the shape of the future for the BBC? When cost cuts start to bite let’s save money by switching off the broadcast transmitters and the satellite transponders and move online.
The viewing habits of the young have changed. The BBC has to keep pace with technological change, transform itself again as it always has…will that become the fate of BBC III! or even BBCI! and BBC News?
Luckily it’s not quite that simple. There was a real chance last year that the BBC News channel would indeed be next for the chop and face closure as a broadcast channel and move to an entirely online and mobile existence.
Closer examination showed that few of the hoped-for cost savings would actually materialise. Proper, timely news journalism is an expensive business whatever the means of distribution.
You would also have to balance modest savings of around 15 per cent of total annual costs of more than £100 million against the loss of presence and impact while bequeathing the 24-hour television news market in the UK to Sky.
Lord Hall put it well last year when he admitted that the BBC might have to ride two horses over the next decade.
The horses of course involve catering for those who get their media via the internet and those – at the moment the large majority – who watch and listen to traditional channels.
The reality is that the BBC will probably have to ride its multiple horses not for the next decade but for a generation at least and budget accordingly. The same will apply to all existing traditional or “proven” broadcasters as the latest terminology has it.
The issues demonstrate the complexity of choices facing all broadcasters, particularly public service broadcasters, who are expected on declining resources to be all things to all people pretty much all of the time and have a presence on all available platforms.
Never mind the competing nationalisms within the UK – the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh all wanting more from themselves – and the desperate competition between the different genres of programmes. How much drama is the right amount compared with news and how do public service broadcasters manage to hold on to any meaningful live sports rights?
The recent entertaining merry-go-round over Formula One and horse racing rights is a case in point. The BBC can no longer afford its slice of Formula One races. So Channel 4 outbids ITV for the rights, deploying the weapon of ad-free races and just possibly, as Mediatel colleague Dominic Mills suggested this week, loading the balance sheet with costs as an anti-privatisation poison pill.
Meanwhile ITV whips horse racing off Channel 4 to take the sport on board after a 31-year absence.
Yet underlying the multiple complexities is the “two horse” question – how quickly broadcasting will come to the end of its useful life and be replaced by the internet as the ultimate international distributor of all video content.
Nobody really knows but on present evidence it won’t happen anytime soon, which of course will exacerbate Tony Hall’s two horse dilemma.
Some partial evidence is on the way – the performance of BBCII! as opposed to BBC Three.
The coming battle between the Chris Evans version of Top Gear and the online Jeremy Clarkson variety should also shine a little light on the issue.
In that case the horse carrying Evans and the Clarkson steed could both turn out to be winners.
Evans may be able to recreate Top Gear as the prime motoring programme on broadcast television, retaining its previous audiences, while Clarkson uses his previous broadcast notoriety to attract a sizeable online audience from around the world.